“Hum. I think I have enough to help narrow down the list.”
He turned to Boris and the others. “Have you finished that list and narrowed down by removing answers that fit only one? “They gathered round the table, eliminating answers that only covered one or two pieces of the puzzle. Finally, they were left with a half dozen: Fire, Despair, Fear, Nothing, Hope, and Grace.
“Well, Fire is definitely out,” Gyada commented. “Most hearths have a fire after all.”
“I’d drop Grace and Nothing. Grace doesn’t fit being easily found in battle, and that pair doesn’t make sense with Nothing as the answer to them at all.”
There was silence. They had narrowed it down to three. “Fear doesn’t fit as well with the first pair of clues either,” Alecta suggested. “Hope and Despair both seem to answer it, though. Maybe Hope is a better fit, but Despair still works.” Janna narrowed her eyes, then nodded slowly in agreement.
All eyes turned to Paul. “It’s so nice to be appreciated for my mind,” He said with a lopsided grin.
Alecta whacked him on the back of the head. “It’d happen far more often if you’d stop acting like a clown,” she grumbled.
Paul shrugged while rubbing the back of his head. That was true enough after all. “Now, which one would a narcissistic sadist use? It comes down to blocking off her ability to tell anyone the answer. However, he managed that. If he’d left her able to tell anyone the answer would be Despair. Plus, he’d have made it harder for her to communicate at all. Because he made her unable to give the answer, but only put otherwise light restrictions on her ability to communicate, I’d bet on Hope. Hard to be certain if he’d lost touch with reality completely but Hope is the more likely answer all things considered. It would have been another way for him to torture the personality.”
Suddenly, all hell broke loose on the systems. Alarms blared in the conference room.
“I swear, it wasn’t me.” Paul smiled.
Boris typed in a code to the computer in the room and said, “No, it wasn’t.” He turned the screen to face the others.
One of the twenty-four assets or someone from their families had triggered their panic button.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Moscow, Russia
Ivan and Anton had been tasked to keep an eye on the Chinese after Ivan submitted his report to Janna. They were to set up a signal intelligence intercept on the Chinese intelligence outpost in Moscow. They knew the frequencies that the Russian bugs would be using. This enabled them to catch anything for those devices. They also set up listening posts on several of the windows. These would burst transmit any recordings back to their daytime operations site.
All in all, it was a tidy, if undermanned, operation. If they weren’t getting support from New Romanovka on the analysis side, there wouldn’t be much point to it. But they were, and most of their duties involved making sure the systems were still running.
After two weeks, orders came down to track down and capture the agent called Bohai from the outpost. He seemed to be taking too much interest in New Romanovka for Boris to be happy with. Taking him out was a risk, as it might make the Chinese more curious. But if he were taken by Russians, it might also look like an official government operation, which could dissuade the Chinese from continuing to investigate the town. They had enough problems without aggravating the Russian government.
Denying that someone got pissed off enough at you to flatten a mountain tended to leave you with a lot of internal problems. Denying to the outside world that it happened, when there were plenty of satellites that could see the evidence was really quite silly.
Ivan and Anton also knew there were half-dozen personages that they might be requested to extract. Therefore, it was only a mild surprise when they got a request to call in over the specialized equipment.
“Sleepy to Mama Bear. Requested contact initiated.”
“Enemy activity around Laborer. Beacon sent. Request you remove Laborer’s family to outskirts of Hive. Pack will be in support. Pickup will meet you in no more than four hours.”
Despite the supposed security of the special communications network, Janna insisted on using code names and operational terms. Evgenni had triggered his get me out beacon. Someone would be sent in a pod to pick him up. Ivan and Anton were to get his family out of harm’s way in case they became secondary targets. They should have up to four additional assets en route and should move towards the outskirts on foot until their supports arrived.
Ivan was pissed off now. It was probably those Chinese fuckers that were involved. Why his own government hadn’t cleared them out, he’d never know.
The philosophy that it was better to know who the enemy spies were and where they were only made sense up to a point. The fact that this outpost was the only one that the Russians closely watched made it certain that there were other sites the Chinese had, that the government had never found out about.
“We know you talked to Boris, Evgenni. Helped him cut a deal with the government so they wouldn’t harass him further. That would be enough for us to take you and torture you. That you might have additional information that could be useful to us?” He looked over at the man, “is just the icing on the cake.”
Bohai said this as he took a needle to a medical vial of fluid. “I can never remember what this stuff is called. I don’t really need to know. All I need to know is it will increase the amount of pain you feel by a factor of ten at a minimum. That is for people who are particularly insensitive to its effects.”
Evgenni’s heartbeat had increased significantly when the needle came out. He didn’t like needles, and the thought of what might be in the needle disturbed him further. However, he’d also been responsible for checking the structural integrity of many buildings in NVG sites. Nothing in this room matched the carnage potential he’d seen fulfilled at those sites. Arms ripped off, some fast, some slow. Bodies completely eviscerated, with blood trails indicating that despite a significant percentage of their organs being on the ground, the person involved had still been alive for some time.
He knew what Boris and his people were capable of. He doubted the Chinese had the same… Potential. He was clinging to the hope that he had managed to get off the signal to Boris for his people. He had been briefed on Boris’ history, and he knew that if it was Boris who turned up, the five Chinese spies in the room and outside its door would be slabs of meat before the night was over.
Whether he was alive at that time or not.
“Somehow Gyada got wind of this mission Boris. She is insisting she is ready to go. She’s promised not to change and has already collected several axes and knives, “Danislav was telling his father figure with some trepidation.
After weeks of training with the woman from the past, he just outright feared her. “She’s even promised to follow my lead. Not that I’m sure she will, but she might. She’s realized that there are a lot of different dangers in the world today, from what they were in her time.”
Boris glared at his second in command, “How the hell did she find out about the mission? “He growled.
“She claims she could smell the excitement from the caves. Besides, we have been talking about doing training missions for several weeks now. Ever since Bethany Anne dropped a handful of mark two pods on us, for our use. You said she’d be cleared for those training runs. She seems to assume that means she’s authorized for this, too.”